long love's day
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: Christine is 5 the first time she goes into the past, 6 the first time she meets Sorelli in the year 1920. Her best friend is in the past, all her pasts and futures exist at once, and there is so much grief but so much love too, and she loves a girl with deep dark eyes who lived before she was born. Companion to 'make our sun stand still'. Christine/Sorelli. Philippe/Sorelli. E/C
1. 1

**A/N: Title again taken from 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell. This is going to be a short multi-chapter work, and just a note that it opens with character death. But I promise it won't be all doom and gloom!**

* * *

They pull him from the water still breathing, still breathing, blood running down half his face from a gash on his forehead, his shirt stained dark and red, whole body limp and heavy in unconsciousness.

Still breathing as they pull him from the water, his pulse still flickering in his throat, faint and too fast, and they lay him on the deck, these nameless sailors she's disguised herself to join, and one of them runs to send a wire to land to say they've got him, the jagged rocks of Howth still against the sky but she can't look, she doesn't see, she kneels down beside this man whose breaths are shallow gasps, his lips stained with his own blood, and knows a face she's only seen in books, in old newspaper clippings, here, alive (just about) not a frozen memory.

She is the one whose leg props him, keeps him rolled on his side, her fingers the ones that press into his throat, the palm of her hand the one that wipes the blood from his lips, and another one of the boys tears his shirt open, calls for towels and blankets to put pressure on the jagged wounds, the blood already staining his hands, but it's no use, no good, because the man beneath her hands, beneath their hands, gasps and retches a great rush of water stained red, and his breath is barely a whimper, and then doesn't come at all, and the pulse flickers and fades beneath her fingertips even as they roll him on his back, his lips barely parted, and the heel of her palm is the one that rubs his chest, rubs his chest even as she knows it's no good, knows it's no good in the same way she knows she is Christine Daaé, twenty-two and displaced out of time, and when she woke it was 14 May 2014 but here, this, now, it is 9 March 1939, and he doesn't draw breath, and his pulse doesn't flicker back to life because there is nothing in this time, on this boat, that would make it, not in the absence of ventilators and AEDs and rapid blood transfusers and stimulating cardiac drugs.

And he lies still, and silent, and pale beneath her hands as the headache pounds behind her eyes, and something shaped like grief tears itself in her heart.

And he is, was, Philippe de Chagny, and she has finally met him, on the day he died.

(She thinks of Sorelli, and the Sorelli she last met had not come to know Philippe, not yet, some of the Sorellis she's met have known him, but the Sorelli of this time loves him more than anyone else in the world and she thinks he's coming to see her—she doesn't know—)

* * *

The first time it happened she was five, quietly playing with the plastic farm animals Granny Anea gave her for her birthday when she got a headache, and when she opened her eyes again the room around her had changed, the animals were gone, and she was naked.

A kind lady with curling golden hair and big blue eyes knelt down and put a blanket around her, and told her she was a Christine too.

(And she didn't know it then, didn't know it for a long time, but the kind lady with the golden hair and big blue eyes was her, from way in the future.)

Big Christine made her drinking chocolate, just the way she liked it, with cream on top, and told her she had time travelled, that her headache was a warning. And she was a little afraid, to think she had time travelled, but Big Christine said it was okay, that she was a time traveller too, and had time travelled just to meet her.

"We can't control it, but it's okay. It's nothing to be frightened of."

And Big Christine told her that she could tell her Daddy, and Granny Anea, and told her to write down the date, 22 May 1947. And promised that she would be there to meet her, the next time she travelled, and that she would have a friend.

And then she blinked, and when she opened her eyes again she was back in her room, with all her animals, and her dress was right there on the floor, so she put it on. And she couldn't decide if maybe she was dreaming or if maybe this Big Christine was a witch, but she remembered that date and wrote it down and showed it to her Daddy, and her Daddy's eyes got all wet and he hugged her and said, "it's okay, baby, it's okay."

And that was when he told her he was a time traveller too.

(Granny Anea was not a time traveller. Her Mummy was not a time traveller either, but her Mummy died when she was a baby, and she knew what she looked like from pictures.)

It was 22 May 1997, and she was a time traveller.

* * *

The next time it happened Big Christine was waiting for her in a bright kitchen, and had a dress for her to put on. And when they had their drinking chocolate, Big Christine introduced her to her friend Sorelli. And Sorelli was the prettiest lady she had ever seen, with her curling black hair and big dark eyes like someone from a fairytale, like Snow White even though Snow White was paler. And she smiled at her and kneeled down and said, "hello, Christine" and her voice was like music.

And Christine suddenly felt very small and very shy but Big Christine told her it was okay, and if Big. Christine said it was okay then it had to be so she smiled back even though she was still shy.

She didn't stay long, that time, before she was back in her room, and she wrote down the date, 23 May 1947.

* * *

Her list grew as she did, and the first time she met the little girl that she knew was Sorelli was 7 June 1920, and she knew it because Little Sorelli told her when she asked the way Big Christine told her to, and she knew it was Little Sorelli because Big Christine had shown her a picture.

They were both six, and Little Sorelli gave her a dress to wear and they played with a battered doll and she told Little Sorelli about her Daddy's violin, and about the aeroplane they went on to London, and they sang before she had to go.

* * *

By the time she turned ten she'd filled a notebook with the dates she'd travelled to and the things she did with Sorelli. (Playing, mostly. Singing, sometimes. Telling stories, going for walks.) Her Dad gave her two journals that year, and reminded her to always keep a record, because she'd want to look back someday, and his eyes were sad and she knew he was thinking of her Mum.

(She was never really able to be sad about her Mum. How could she be sad over someone she couldn't remember? But more and more she wondered what her Mum was like, and her Dad told her stories whenever she asked, which was how she knew her Mum loved music too, and stars, and old books, and that her parents met at a concert, and Dad ruined their first date by travelling in the middle of it, and it was two days before he came back, but by then an older version of him had visited Mum and she'd forgiven him.)

She keeps her journals and she never knows when she's going to visit Sorelli but she always looks forward to it.

Sometimes, now, she's able to control it. Just enough to delay leaving, and it makes the headaches worse when she does go, but at least she doesn't get in trouble in school.

* * *

She's twelve when she first sees Sorelli Conway in a history book.

Her heart almost stops when she sees her own birthday there, and it is the day Sorelli died.

22 April 1992.

She was born, and Sorelli died.

Sorelli died.

That little girl, with her hair in plaits playing with a doll, telling her about fairies and how the Tans came and took Eoin's Papa but her, Sorelli's Papa, said he was toe-rag and an IRA bastard, and the shock of the curse-word was enough to make them giggle. Her best friend who sings with her and pushed her into the river and lay down with her one night when she turned up and they put names on all the stars.

And she's dead.

Christine's head reels, her stomach churns and she's going to be sick, and if she doesn't get sick she'll travel but she can't travel, not now, not like this, not when she's in school.

She puts her hand up and tells Miss Kelly she's sick and needs to go home, and Miss Kelly lets her out to ring Anea. Dad travelled last night and wasn't back when she left for school so there's no point ringing him.

She tells Anea that she doesn't feel very well, and Anea knows what that means by now and says she'll be there in five minutes.

She's there in three, and Christine bundles her history book into her bag with her other things, and makes it to the car just in time. She barely has her seatbelt on when the world turns and the colours change and she closes her eyes to keep herself from getting sick.

She opens her eyes to darkness, to darkness and slanting moonlight and the soft rustling of animals, smell of earth heady in the air.

She is naked and cold, the chill in her bones, and she promises herself she's going to learn how to bring things through, laws of physics bedamned she's against all the laws of physics (so Big Christine said, and she still calls her that even though she knows, now, Big Christine is just her when she's older), and then she stops promising herself things, because she realizes she's in a graveyard.

A graveyard, a headstone before her, and the slanting moonlight lighting up the name, Eleanor "Sorelli" Conway, and two dates, 1914 and 1992, and a line of Irish but she can't read it, her stomach caught in her throat and tears blurring her eyes, and of course Sorelli is dead, of course, but she doesn't want her to be dead. She doesn't want it.

And her head spins before she can think about it but it's not fair, it's not fair that her Mum is dead and grandad Fabian is dead and now Sorelli is dead too (but Sorelli has been dead a long time, as long as she's been alive) and it's not fair it's not fair she doesn't want people to be dead she doesn't want it and she blinks and she's in her own room but she's still crying, still crying, great heaving gasps and Anea's arms are wrapping around her, pulling her close, and someday Anea will be dead too, like her Mum and like Fabian and like Sorelli, and she doesn't want Anea to die, not ever.

Anea wraps her in a night gown and puts her to bed, and rubs her back as she cries, and she sleeps, she must, because when she wakes again Dad is lying beside her, and he holds her tighter and kisses her hair, and she presses herself closer to him, so close she can hear his heart beating, hear his breathing, and it is as if she is a little girl again, but he is the only one who understands, the only one who can ever understand.

(The next time she wakes he is asleep, and she crawls out of bed and puts on her lamp, and takes out her history book. And there is Sorelli's picture, all grown up, dated April 1938, and she is so pretty, with her curling hair and her dark eyes, and her head tilted back as if she knows all of the secrets of the world. For the first time it hits Christine, really and truly, that someday she will be all grown up too, and the grown up version of her will know this grown up version of Sorelli, and they will be friends.)

(She looks at this picture of Sorelli, looks at the face she knows and it is that of a lady, and for the first time, ever, she wants to kiss her.)

* * *

She studies hard in school and does well, and learns to love history for the stories it can tell her, and how it can prepare her, and reads all she can find about Sorelli Conway, who once was a little girl who was her best friend. She reads, too, about Philippe de Chagny, who Sorelli loved, and who died.

(Everyone always dies.)

She travels almost as much as before, and usually it is to see Sorelli who always hugs her, even when she's sad, like after her Papa died (and that time Christine holds her as she cries), and she learns to pretend that she doesn't know what will happen, that the past where she finds herself is just as much a mystery as the present where she lives.

The first time she kisses a girl she is fifteen. It is August 2007 and she is tired of leaving and never being able to stay, tired of leaving Sorelli, tired of not doing things in case she leaves and cannot stop it, so she kisses Aoife because she can't help it and Aoife's lips are just as soft as they look and she tastes of the white wine they stole from Aoife's mother, and it's a nice kiss, until the moment Aoife slaps her and tells her to stop messing.

(She goes away and never brings herself to talk to Aoife again, but it doesn't stop the secret thing glowing inside her, growing and whispering for to kiss Sorelli.)

She is fifteen, too, when she first kisses a boy. March 2008, and Kevin's lips taste of cheese and onion crisps and his eyes are deep and dark, his hair just a little long, and it's a messy kiss and she decides she doesn't like it very much, but she might like it more if it were a nicer boy than Kevin.

She sets her sights on Daniel, and turns sixteen, but before she can ask him if he'd like to kiss her, her world turns upside down.

* * *

5 May 2008, and she is in school studying for exams. Miss Lambe is revising rural electrification with them, and she knows this all already so she's half-dozing when there is the knock on the door, and Toner sticks his head in, and asks her to bring her bag.

She has no appointment, not with anyone, she has not done anything, and there is only one Christine Daaé in the school, because really, how common is the surname Daaé?, so he cannot have gotten mixed up.

(Already a deep dark thing that feels distinctly wrong is twisting in her stomach.)

Anea is waiting for her in the school office, and she doesn't need to ask, doesn't need to say a word, because Anea takes her into her arms, and there are tears in her hair, and her face was pale enough to tell a whole story without tears.

* * *

Dad, dead. He said he didn't feel too well, had a touch of a headache that was different, and he was at his violin when he collapsed.

Just collapsed.

The ambulance, and it was already too late when they got him to the hospital.

A brain haemorrhage, they think.

But she can't take it in, not a word of it. All she knows is her Dad is dead.

* * *

She travels after the funeral, never sure where, the force of too much, of everything, tossing her through time. She sees her parents as they were, happy and together before her (before her birth killed her mother and is that her fault? Something that happened because of her condition?) and they are happy in love and her Dad reaches over a park table to kiss her Mum and he's grinning in a way she never remembers him grinning before and she can't bear to see it, not a moment longer, so she closes her eyes, closes her eyes and opens them and she is in a crowded room full of swirling music and laughing people and there in the centre are Sorelli, an older Sorelli like the one in all the photographs she keeps in her room, and a tall blond man who she knows, she knows is Philippe de Chagny and even as she watches de Chagny grins and leans down and kisses Sorelli and she has no right to Sorelli but she can't bear this either so she closes her eyes again and she's in a graveyard and in a church and in a theatre and Sorelli is on stage and she is at a concert and her parents are dancing to the music and Dad's hair is longer than it's ever been except in pictures and just as golden as hers and she's somewhere different every time she blinks, and it's only when she finds herself back in her room and Anea pulls her into her arms that she realises she brought her clothes for all of it.

(She will sleep a long time, and lie in bed awake, and the places she visited will already be hazy and lost, but she will always remember how happy everyone looked, and that she had her clothes.)

* * *

**A/N: Next installment should arrive in a day or two. If you have enjoyed this, please review!**


	2. 2

Her father knew he was going to die, knew how and when and never told anyone, never told _her_. If she had ever travelled to the future she would have known too, but all of her journeys have been to the past and is that because the past is her future? Or is it that there is something wrong with her?

She should have known. She should have found out. She should have tried to _stop it_.

(If she had tried to stop it it would have made no difference. What happened happened and would have happened anyway, some way, and there was nothing anyone could have done.)

She finds out only afterwards, from a letter he wrote her, telling her he loved her, and she was the most special part of his life, and he had not told her he would die because he had not wanted her to be afraid, to have to carry that knowledge.

_Bad enough that we should know so much but we should always try to live as if we do not…_

* * *

She cuts her hair and dyes it black, wears it slicked back. She does not speak for three weeks, just plays his violin when she is not in school, and sits her exams in June as normal. If she speaks she will want to scream. If she screams she will never be able to stop.

They treat her as if she is broken, as if she is the most fragile of glass.

She does not travel.

* * *

It is summer but she throws herself into books, her dad's old history books. She reads of politics and medicine and learns to roll all these names she's heard of only in school. Noël Browne. Donogh O'Malley. Joseph Mary Plunkett. They feel half-real beneath her hands, between the pages, caught intangible between waking and sleeping, between history and stories but all history is stories and all stories are part of history, and the very act of reading about them makes her feel real, makes her feel present and permanent in a way she has never felt, not once in her life.

People like her are not supposed to feel real.

People like her are not supposed to _be_ real.

She reads everything she can off his shelves and wheedles her way into more books, professors and archivists taking pity on the only daughter, the only survivor, of the historian who died so suddenly, and she absorbs _Against the Tide_ in a day because there is nothing else for her, and she learned to read fast when she learned to read because there is no telling what time she might have or when she might get back.

Too-big coats and scarfs and sunglasses and she never feels warm but there is reality in her fingertips, and she does not travel.

She ruminates on illness and religion and love of a woman and time and the lack of it, and how it all caused the Mother and Child crisis because she needs something to ruminate on, something other than her Dad being dead and not having warned her it would happen, something other than the memory more known than remembered of Sorelli kissing someone that is not her but of course Sorelli kissed someone who is not her, Sorelli does not (did not, but it is impossible to think of her in the past tense when she is her present and future) does not know how she feels for her, know how her lips beg for those lips, and besides the world was different then and Sorelli is dead and they can never meet in linear time so does it really matter and is that better or worse or always worse or is there a question? And is she a terrible orphan for dwelling on it when her parents are dead and she is so hollow inside that it is sometimes hard to breathe?

The questions are too much, so much, and it is easier to dwell on fifty-seven year old conflicts and the collapse of a government than to let herself think on them.

* * *

Her father did not travel for two years after her mother died, Anea tells her on a morning in August so thick with humidity and promised thunder her head aches with it. Did not travel for two years, then spent six months leaving every few days, coming back paler and thinner and more tired, and never speaking of where he had been, and she always suspected the past.

(It could have been the future either.)

She wishes to never travel again. Wishes to cease, and be a whole person.

* * *

September comes and school again and they all treat her with kid gloves.

She travels only once, in October, and finds herself in an ornate cathedral in her too-big black coat (and still she does not understand why it came with her now when it never would before) and she cannot understand Latin and there is a coffin in front of the altar and that is when she knows it is a funeral.

She catches the name Philippe de Chagny out of the morass of unfamiliar words, and casts about wildly for Sorelli, but there is no sign of her, of that black head, and didn't one old article she found refer to Sorelli being in hospital?

But she cannot think of it because she is part of a crowd of people and they are all moving, moving, moving towards the front and she remembers this, knows what this is, the shaking of the hands of the bereaved and she saw more people than she ever saw in her life as she stood at the front of the church looking up at her dad's coffin and all these people whose names she couldn't remember filed past to shake her hand and she is part of that crowd now.

Part of that crowd now, but it is not her hand she will shake. Not her hand but that of a boy who looks no older than she is, his face pale as death and his eyes bloodshot, blond hair hanging drab and lifeless and an expression of numbness on his face and she wonders if that is how she looked, if he is a reflection of her.

His hand is light is hers and his eyes are blue as the sky, shining against the red from his tears, and he is not a reflection of her because he is Raoul de Chagny and he is alone now in the world too.

1939 and she feels herself starting to go so she lets go of that hand and slips back into the crowd and gasps hard against the pain in her chest as she closes her eyes and spinning time takes her takes her takes her back home.

* * *

Late October, a house in Malahide. The sky overcast and grey and car lights shining bright through the gloom, trees a blended mass of gold and bronze and deep burning red. She told Anea she was going to the library, to take out more history books.

She is not even quite sure why she lied. It rolled too naturally off her tongue.

There is some part of her aware that girls like her should not be going to the houses of men they have never met, never even spoken to, not even ones in Malahide. But some deep thing inside her, unnameable, unplaceable, urged her on, and it has been on her mind all through her reading of the summer, more so ever since that funeral of sixty-nine years ago.

The polite thing to do would have been to phone ahead. She was afraid, even as she knew it, that to do so would have been to cost her her nerve.

She raises her hand to the door, but before she can knock it opens, and reveals the gaunt frame of Raoul de Chagny, head of snow white hair, stooped slightly at the shoulders.

Eighty-five years old, and this is him in linear time.

It is on the tip of her tongue to apologize, to say she has the wrong house, but he looks her over, her too-big coat, her hair curling and black even with her blonde eyebrows and the roots starting to show through, the violin case slung over her shoulder because something urged her to bring it, and the face that was faintly stern, that she last saw at sixteen raw with grief, softens into a smile, blue eyes shining bright.

"Miss Christine Daaé," and his voice is gentle and not what she expected (what had she expected?), "impeccable timing as ever. The kettle is just boiled." The door opens, and she steps inside.

* * *

He was expecting her, that much was evident. Expecting her, and already had two cups set out.

"Far be it for me to tell you your own future," he says, adding milk to her tea as she watches stupefied, "but there are a great deal of documents Sorelli wished you have, just not yet. And you, the other you, said it was necessary for you to grow into them first."

It sounds like just the sort of thing her father would have said, and anger flares, and grief, but the grief wins and tightens itself around her heart, the weight in her throat too thick to speak.

Sorelli, thinking of her, thinking of her up to the day she died, up to the day she was born.

Her other self, who must, at some time, have come to know Raoul, come to know him, and know him well for him to know her secret.

(And so she is to travel again.)

(She never really doubted she would.)

* * *

The dye grows out of her hair, and she cuts off the hanging remnants of black. She visits Raoul every Saturday for tea and sometimes they talk about Sorelli, and sometimes they talk about his brother, but mostly he asks about her, and they talk about what she's studying in school, and things in the news, her violin-playing, and he lets her talk as long as she wants about her dad, and makes her more tea, and when she can't see for the tears blurring her eyes he gives her tissues, and all the time she needs.

And it is not better, but it is easier, easier to breathe, easier to feel something that's not only hollowness, not only anger, and she thinks, maybe, he has been very lonely too.

* * *

A year passes, a year since her dad has been gone. And she knows he's not coming back this time but sometimes it still catches her off guard, a slip of the light, as if she'll blink and he'll be there.

He always came back before, every time he was gone. Why is this time allowed to be different?

They have a Mass for him, and she plays his violin even as the tears trickle down her cheeks.

Afterwards there is food, and visitors, like the funeral all over again, and she pleads a headache and goes to bed, wanting only to be alone.

Wanting only to be alone, but when she opens her eyes she is naked, and Sorelli is handing her a dress with a smile.

Not the Sorelli of the pictures, a younger one, thin and tired but smiling to see her. Sorelli at eighteen (eighteen and so pretty even in her thinness, even with the angles that make her not-Sorelli, and there is a softness that lives in her features that makes Christine's heart throb and ache) and everything catches in her throat, a year of permanence, a year of grief and trying not to feel it, a year of missing Sorelli with an ache that made her think she would die, and the tears come unbidden, and Sorelli pulls her into her arms.

("I think you should be an actress," she will say, afterwards, and Sorelli will smile sadly and answer, "Eoin told me that too.")


	3. 3

The year she is seventeen, the world goes wild for _The Time Traveler's Wife_.

It is in every bookshop, every cinema. Posters up around the city, trailers on tv. She gives up watching telly, not that she watched it much anyway, the flashing screen sometimes triggering her headaches. She is not even safe from it in school, girls talking about it, how sad it is, how much they love it.

She longs to scream _that's my life _even as it isn't, even as it's different, but it's too close and too much, and if they knew, if they only knew—

They would never understand. They _could_ never understand.

The disorientation, the tiredness, the sickness, the vertigo of getting tossed out of your own time, always feeling just slightly imbalanced, and they take it as _entertainment_, love it as a _tragic story_?

It cuts something deep inside that she never knew was there.

Her mother died having her. Her father knew he was going to die and never told her, never told anyone, just carried that with him and for how long? He didn't say. She is in love with a woman who died the day she was born, who she can never meet in linear time, but who she met eighty and nearly ninety years ago, and they call all this _romantic_?

She itches to tear something, itches to scream, itches to find a way to make them all understand, but she can't she can't, it's all impossible, and Anea lets her take two weeks off school during the worst of it because she understands enough, and she doesn't travel but she does go to visit Raoul, and he takes one look at her and makes her drinking chocolate and adds the smallest dash of whiskey to it "for your nerves" and something about the illicitness of it, that she is still six months away from drinking age, warms her inside even more than the faintest edge of alcohol does.

She lies down on his couch, and he potters around, and reads his newspaper, and goes into the room he calls his library, and leaves her be, and she pretends she doesn't exist, and then it is easier to breathe, a whole world easier.

(He comes out a little while later, a stack of dvd cases all carefully marked up, homemade and transferred from videos, and sets them down beside her. "I know you've followed up the Mother and Child affair," he says softly, and she knows he knows because they discussed it at length and he poured her more tea and pushed a packet of chocolate biscuits her way as she expounded on all of her theories, and then he told her his memories of it, as an academic, and an outsider, "but here's every documentary Noël Browne was ever in." And it's on the tip of her tongue to ask _how?_, tears prickling the backs of her eyes at the impossibility of it, of the sheer magnitude of it, when he smiles and his smile is knowing and whispers of the fingerprints of her older self, "I was advised to always keep a record.")

* * *

The first time she meets Erik, she is seventeen and he is thirty. (The first time they meet in linear time, she will be twenty-two and he will be twenty-nine, but she has no way of knowing that, not yet, and it is already his past, so he will not mention it.)

It is a dark evening, November maybe, frost in the air and the gloom heavy and low, and she finds herself on a lane, lined with trees on both sides, totally naked.

She has no idea where she is, no idea _when_ she is, no idea where to go, but it's fucking cold and she shivers and wraps her arms around herself, and wishes the headache would come back and take her the hell out of here.

She has exams to be getting ready for.

Crack of a stick and she whirls around, heart throbbing, neck prickling, and a low voice comes from the shadows. "12 November 2015." A flicker of movement, and a heavy coat, thrust out. "Forgive me but I was told not to look directly."

The date, the knowledge to be here, the coat. She takes it and wraps it around herself, and feels just a little easier. Clearly he knows her secret. Clearly he knows her other self.

"You can look now." Her voice is steadier than she expected it might be, but she has a good deal of practice at finding herself in unusual places.

A flicker of movement, a beam of light fills the lane, and she looks up into hazel eyes, shining like gold, and a pale face.

Her first impression is his height. She is not the smallest of girls, but he is head and neck above her. And then she sees the twist of his upper lip (harelip, repaired), the slight angle of his shoulders, and there is something just slightly _off_ about his face, something she can't quite put her finger on, only that it is a good face, maybe, or might be, if it were not for an asymmetry, something that leaves one cheek sharper than the other.

She decides she likes him, if only because her other self trusts him enough to have sent him here.

"Erik." And the hand he offers is fine-boned and slender, long fingers that whisper of a musician, and make something flutter inside her.

"Christine." And she takes that hand — just a little cold — and shakes it.

His smile is warmer than any she has ever seen, any except Sorelli's. "I know."

And that is how she knows that somehow, in some way, someday, Erik will be her lover.

* * *

She does not stay long, but they share tea from a flask, and she wonders how they will meet, properly, when it will be, but he says only "Maynooth" and will not be drawn, so she leaves him be.

Home again, and the world is as she left it, but something has taken root inside of her, something that was not there before, and when she thinks of Sorelli there is the old ache, a little dulled, and she thinks of Erik and feels just a little nudge, a tickling in the back of her mind.

* * *

The spring comes, she turns eighteen, sits her exams in June. She watches the documentaries Raoul gave her, and re-watches them, and re-watches them, and forms theories that she does not have the sources to support, and perhaps the sources do not exist but no matter. The turning over of them keeps her occupied, and in August she learns she received full points, all six hundred, on her exams, and she needs little more than half of them but the satisfaction of having done as well as she possibly could have soothes something deep inside.

She is accepted into the history undergrad in UCD (she considered Trinity, but she's decided to leave that for her PhD, considered Maynooth if only for what Erik said, and decided to leave it for her Masters), and that night, she goes.

She goes, and finds herself outside a theatre, wrapped in her big coat and her dress still underneath (and why this sometimes happens she still has not formed a theory on, she only knows that any time she consciously tries to bring something she cannot). Glowing golden lights slanting through the misty drizzle, and the dresses of the ladies bustling past say early twentieth century, their hairstyles the thirties, and she knows without knowing that she is to see Sorelli.

The door opens, and her heart leaps, and there she is, laughing and beautiful, her dark hair tumbling curls, and she grins when her gaze falls on Christine, grins, her deep brown eyes dancing, and Christine can't help it, her heart possesses her and she pulls her in for a hug and kisses her, lightly, on the cheek.

Her heart throbs, Sorelli's ears burn red, and then they are both giggling, both laughing, dancing and twirling each other around.

"When?" she gasps, stumbling, and Sorelli's grin is still bright.

"1933." And so they have time, yet, time before Sorelli meets Philippe de Chagny.

* * *

She spends a week and they go to shows, to the park, to the library, and it is as if they are girls again, mere children, as they lie in the grass in Phoenix Park and gaze up at the clouds and talk of nothing much at all.

She sleeps in Sorelli's bed, and wakes, in the night, just to look at her, to look at this girl, the most beautiful in the world, her best friend across time, to study that sleeping face, the delicate lashes, their soft shadows, the fineness of that nose, the angle of her cheek. It is all she can do not to reach out, all she can do not to trace her fingers over it, to brush her lips against those lips, but the brushing of lips would be an intrusion, the tracing of fingers too intimate, and she holds herself still, and curls into a ball, and when Sorelli shifts and stirs she fakes sleep, but she cannot sleep. How can she sleep, when Sorelli is here beside her? When she is in Sorelli's bed?

Sleep is such a waste of time at a time like this, but she keeps her eyes closed, keeps her breathing steady, as she feels Sorelli's breath warm on her cheek, warm and soft, and for a moment, one mad moment, she thinks Sorelli might be about to kiss her, but then the breath is gone, the bed stirs, and a chill catches her that makes her shiver and curl up tighter.

The shuffle of footsteps, and when she cracks open one eye, Sorelli is at the window. A sigh drifts to her through the quiet of the room, and she swallows, some thick unnameable emotion in her throat, swallows and tries not to think about it, as her eyes slip closed.

* * *

She loses days, loses weeks, skips through time. 1933, again and again, different days, different months, and again, and again, 1932 for good measure, 1934 twice.

1938, September. Her big coat wrapped around her, date learned from the top of a newspaper, and her feet lead her to the Steevens Hospital. Steevens, and she feels very young, and very old, all at once.

Tuberculosis of the bone, the femur.

A curse, for an actress, and a dancer, and her heart wrenches.

(Supposing she meets Philippe de Chagny? It is barely six months before he dies. Has he proposed yet? But Sorelli is here, Sorelli…)

The enquiry, for Eleanor Conway, directs her to a ward, two rows, to a bed at the end of a line of eleven.

The girl in the bed next to it is held rigid in a cage that circles her torso, her arms free and lying at her sides, and gives her a smile that might be friendly.

But Christine has eyes only for Sorelli.

Two months of illness, of confinement, and her skin has grown ashen, that beautiful hair hanging lank, but she smiles for to see her, her dulled eyes brightening.

Christine manages a smile that feels like a grimace, even as tears prickle at the backs of her eyes.

She takes the seat beside the bed, and curls her fingers around Sorelli's (still warm, still soft), and keeps her gaze away from the cage around her leg.

A _cage_.

She shudders to her very bones.

"You're younger than you've been in a while," Sorelli's voice is low, barely a whisper, and Christine swallows.

"Do I visit often?" Always good to know, to be sure.

A trace of a smile. "Quite a bit."

She does not know what to say, what she can say, so she nods, and it will never feel like enough.

She is grateful, that she will not be staying long.

(Afterwards she rushes for the door, the headache already pounding, and comes face to face with a young dark-haired man that she pushes past. Only back in her own room, when her eyes fall on her books, blurred through her tears, she will realize it was a very young Noël Browne, and the pain will sharpen keen in her chest, and she will not be able to bear it, so she will go to see Raoul, and will not have to pretend to be okay.)


	4. 4

She spends Christmas 2010 in 1942. Dublin, not London (Sorelli is in London, she knows it, feels it like a pull deep beneath her heart urging her across the water, urging her to find those eyes those hands, but she only travels through time, not through space, only through space if it is also through time). Dublin, New Year's Eve, the cold biting clean through to her bones, her dress one she broke into a house and stole (when other little girls were at their daddy's knee learning to count and read she was learning that too but also to pick locks and use knives and tie complicated knots) and there is a boy with blue eyes and blond hair flopping over his brow and something deep inside whispers he is familiar, but how would he be familiar? It is 1942 (she read it off a newspaper) nearly 1943 and she is out of time and full of wine because dammit she deserves something ,but she dances with him and his hands are gentle and his smile is sweet and it is only afterwards, after she has kissed him and he has smiled into her mouth, that she realizes it is Raoul _Raoul_ at nineteen and something wrenches inside her some terrible thing and she whirls away into the arms of the first different boy she can find.

She will never remember much of what happens after that, only that this other boy, who is emphatically not Raoul or anyone she might ever know, takes her to bed and she lets him because she needs something, needs to feel hands, needs touches and kisses and there is longing burning inside her, a deep and desperate need that transcends sense, and he lays her down and she likes it, likes his breath on her throat and the weight of him between her hips, and she will wake in the morning and tears will burn her eyes to this dark-haired handsome face sleeping beside her, and she will think that of course, _of course_ the first man she sleeps with would be a stranger in another time, _of course_ it would be someone whose name she does not know and who is probably dead in linear time, and she swallows the tears down and when the headache comes she goes willingly.

* * *

It is still Christmas morning when she gets home, still Christmas morning and she is tired and aching deep in her bones as she pulls on clothes. All she wants to do is sleep, sleep a long time, sleep for years and not have to think, not have to _know_ about where she has been.

In real time, she has only been gone two hours, but she lived a day and a half in those two hours.

Anea greets her with a smile of, "You're back", when she makes it to the kitchen, and pushes a mug of tea her way. There are presents to open, a dinner to cook, for the two of them and Raoul when he comes (and the thought of facing Raoul after last night—after two hours ago—after 1942 makes something clench inside her, something she doesn't want to think about) but Anea peers at her over her tea, and declares "Christmas can wait" and sends her back to bed.

Back to bed, and she is out like a light, and what she dreams she will never remember, and never remembering is for the best, when what she dreams is of Raoul, and of Sorelli and Philippe, and bad enough her sleeping mind will throw this at her, she does not need to be confronted by it in waking memory.

But she will wake, in time, and it will still be Christmas, and she will open presents, mostly small things from her friends, a new sketchbook and pencils from Anea, an elegant blue scarf from Raoul, and Raoul will come, and she will do her best to be herself because the Raoul of this time is eighty-seven not nineteen but there is a softness in his features that still whispers of that boy she kissed.

(While Anea bustles laying out dinner and insisting they not lift a finger, they will sit together on the couch, by the fire, and he will ask her, quietly, what's on her mind, and she will tell him, not quite tell him but ask him, what he remembers of New Year's Eve 1942, and he will get a look in his eye, a slight frown, before it clears and he says he doesn't remember very much at all, he was very drunk and New Year celebrations blur together at his age, and then he will add, a gleam in his eye, "there might have been something about a girl", and when she goes cold he will grin, a grin that takes twenty years off him, and add, "but a very clever lady once told me it is best not to dwell on the fingerprints left by that girl in our pasts." And she will breathe, "Me?" but he will shake his head, still grinning, and say, "Sorelli." And she will know it is okay to forget about it, and that one night, of sixty-eight years ago, does not matter very much at all.)

* * *

As 2010 turns to 2011 she kisses a boy of her own time, a law student she has seen in the library, curling red hair brushing the nape of his neck, and the fireworks burst overhead to the cheers of the crowd as his hands draw her closer, gentle and careful as if she might break, and she presses herself into him and aches, aches for these hands, and aches for different hands, and longs just to be touched, just to be held, just to be _loved_.

His name is Nollaig, said with a cheeky grin of, "I was supposed to be Christopher, but I came at Christmas" and she wonders how many times he's practiced that line and decides it doesn't matter.

He takes her back to his place, and lays her down on his bed, and there beneath his hands, beneath his kisses, beneath his steadying weight, she feels more real, more _right_ than she has in years.

* * *

One night becomes coffee, becomes lunch, becomes the cinema. It is the first time she has had someone, girlfriend or boyfriend either, and he texts her every night, and they find each other in the library and steal kisses in front of twentieth-century Irish history, in front of medical law, and promise to meet that evening, after lectures, for a drink, maybe.

She travels instead, spends an hour talking to Sorelli in the Steevens Hospital in February 1939 and it is just as terrible as the first time she was there, just as awful to see Sorelli, _her_ Sorelli, in such a place as that, her leg still in a cage, and she feels a great deal more sober, finding herself back in her own room.

Finding a whole day has passed.

Finding Nollaig is dead.

* * *

A heart condition he didn't know he had. Anea is the one to tell her, pulling her close to stop her shaking. A heart condition. Collapsed in the middle of his last lecture, before he could look for her and find her missing, and they did all they could but they couldn't save him.

Twenty, and dead.

Dead.

She doesn't sleep at all that night, but she doesn't cry either. She can't. It's as if all the space for tears has been cut out of her.

(Was it her fault? _Did_ she bring the curse upon him for loving him? Did she love him? Did the fates dictate it so he would never know her secret?)

* * *

Anea and Raoul go with her to the funeral, one each side, keeping her steady, but she can't break down, she can't cry, and she can't say a word to anyone, no matter how she tries, and afterwards she slips away, slips away because she can't bear these sympathetic faces, because she needs to be alone.

She's better when she's alone.

* * *

That spring feels very cold, and very empty. And she doesn't travel, and she barely speaks, and she can barely focus on her assignments but she does well in each of them anyway.

She never visits the graveyard.

She hates visiting graveyards.

She turns nineteen and thinks of Sorelli nineteen years dead and Nollaig two and a half months dead and spends most of the day curled up in bed beneath a pile of duvets.

(Anea brings her tea with whiskey, and sits on the edge of the bed stroking her hair, and doesn't say a word.)

* * *

Is it that she knew him only in linear time?

* * *

The last day of her exams. Anea is visiting her cousin in Wexford, so she is alone in the house. Everything finished and done, and she is lying on her bed, listening to The Cranberries (_Sad that Maud Gonne couldn't stay…she had MacBride anyway…_) and quietly not existing.

Not existing, until she hears a crash, and what might be a muffled curse, and if she were a suspicious woman she might be concerned, but she has been listening to crashes and muffled curses all of her life, for as back as she could ever begin to remember.

Her own future self, probably, when she does not remember this in reverse, herself cast back here for some unfathomable reason that will soon become apparent like "Christine! Don't buy pears on 25 August 2015" and she'll be like "Why?" and 25 August 2015 will come along and she'll see the pears and decide not to buy them or buy them maybe just because she told herself not to and whatever it was happened or might not have happened will still always happen or not happen because that's the way it happened the first time and it will just continue on, a cycle of happenings and not happenings, never _un_happenings because an unhappening implies a first time where it happened. For something to unhappen a different version of events would have to be created and whatever about time travel but different split off worlds? Ridiculous. If it were possible it must have happened a hundred, a thousand!, times by now and there would be a world where her Dad is alive and a world where Nollaig is alive and a world where the Mother and Child affair did not become such a knot and Noël Browne remained minister and everything was _better_ and a world where her life overlapped in linear time with Sorelli's instead of one ending and the other beginning consecutively.

She sighs and re-focuses on Dolores O'Riordan. Dolores O'Riordan spares her having to think.

Spares her having to think, until she hears "Christine?" in a voice that's _dead_, that has _been_ dead for three fucking years now and she opens her eyes, and looks up into her father's face.

* * *

Her father travelled on the day before he died and never told anyone and this is where he came to, this time, and she is the one he saw, and something inside her fractures to see him, something she didn't know was in danger, and the tears come before she can even nod, and he's scooping her into his arms and he's wearing his old dressing gown that she couldn't bring to throw away and it smells of dust and sandalwood, and it doesn't matter that she's nineteen, doesn't matter that she's all grown up now, because she's crying into his shoulder and he's rocking her and he's dead he's dead he's supposed to be dead and _Nollaig_ is dead, dear sweet Nollaig, and she can't say it, can't talk about it but it doesn't matter because her dad is here, her _dad_.

(He will stay for two days, two borrowed sweet days that she never thought she would have, and she will tell him of Nollaig, tell him the things she has never been able to tell anyone about Sorelli and how she feels, and Anea will cry and hug him when she sees him, and he will meet Raoul and they will talk quietly and neither of them will tell her what was said and it won't matter. And he will tell her that he always knew how and when he would die, from the time she was five, and he will give her a list of dates of when he will see her again, when his past self travelled forward, and admonish her not to wait for him, but just to be prepared, and always keep a record, and tell her, at last, where his own record was kept. And he will tell her he has always been proud of her, from the first moment, and it will be the last thing he says before he goes back to the younger her who is to lose him, and she will feel lighter, and easier, and more real than she ever has.)


	5. 5

The last two years of her undergrad pass uneventfully, as uneventfully as they can, for someone like her. She turns from nineteen to twenty, and then to twenty-one. She takes two modules of medical history that she enjoys very much, and would have enjoyed more if it were not for the necessity to restrain herself in the lectures on tuberculosis, reading the extracts from _Against the Tide_. (The lecturer has opinions on Noël Browne and the man's relative objectivity or lack thereof, but Christine has a great deal of opinions on him too, developed from years of reading and analysis and documentary-watching, and that one occasion she actually spoke to him, outside the Steeven's Hospital in November 1938 as he was coming out and she was going in, but she could never admit that, so she holds her tongue and writes a detailed essay on TB treatment in the pre-antibiotic era, with relevant recourse to _Against the Tide_, and the recorded experiences of Sorelli Conway — Raoul having informed her that her future self made allowance for her to read those extracts at this time.)

(Sometimes she really hates the instructions of her future self but she is just as bound to obey as her future self is to give them.)

She has a total of three relationships — Iseult, and when that breaks up, Suzanne, and finally Fionntán. Each of them feels, in some way, like a betrayal, a faint sense of wrongness, as if she is committing acts she ought not to. But she loves them, or as good as loves them knowing that they are not Sorelli and nor are they Nollaig (she has learned to think of him without a mingled stab of guilt and grief in her heart) and nor are they Erik who she has not yet met in linear time, and whose existence part of her is beginning to question. But she is happy with each of them, until they question her absences, until they decide she is deceitful (she is but she has to be, they would never believe her otherwise), until things drift apart, and when that happens, she lets it.

She never meets them outside of linear time. And nobody dies. Sometimes, that feels like enough to ask for.

She makes several drawings, sketches, of the ward where she often visits Sorelli, when time throws her back to those years. She has an excellent memory for scenes, always had and with her condition it's necessary, and she sets pencil to paper, and wins €2000 with a piece she calls "Still Life of a TB Ward, 1938" and everyone calls it imaginative and creative and well-researched, but she just calls it too long sitting at Sorelli's bedside, wondering when will Philippe de Chagny make his appearance (she still has not met him, for all that Sorelli references his visits to her, and she has visited Sorelli in that hospital fifteen times now and none of them are ever easier), and she is not being vain but she will admit she is impressed with her own detailing of the cage Phyllis Harrison wears for her spinal TB, and it amuses her that no one recognizes the slim young man beside her bed as he who would be infamous thirteen years later as the wayward Minister for Health.

(Raoul is the only one it dawns on, the realization bringing a slow smile to his face.)

There are a good deal of other sketches too. Some of them she sells, online and at art exhibitions, and some of them are just for her. One of Raoul, an impression of 1942, one of Nollaig that she sends to his parents. Fireworks over the Liffey, boats in dock. There are several of Sorelli, Sorelli dancing, Sorelli laughing, Sorelli sitting beneath an old oak tree, a book in her lap and one leg carefully crossed over the other, oblivious to the world, and she is complimented, on her ability to capture historical figures in neat lines, people she cannot possibly have met.

(It is easier, to let them think that. Easier to let herself think that, and not admit that they are memories.)

Her dad comes, five times in those two years, sometimes staying only two hours, once staying a whole week, and that version of him is spun forward from when she was seven years old and he finds her on her twenty-first birthday and is pale as ice to lay eyes on her. Each visit of his is sacred, and a relief, and when he leaves again she puts a little mark beside the date on the list, and tries not to think that someday they will dwindle down to none.

(When they meet people he knew in linear time, who were not in on his secret, they tell them he is a cousin of her father's, come to visit, and it pacifies those curious eyes even as the lie tears something inside her, reminds her that he is dead, and not supposed to be here, is here only because for however long or short a time he was not _there_, with her younger self. He is still just as dead in linear time, and when he returns to his own time it is grief again that prickles inside her.)

She graduates top of her year, and leaves UCD behind for Maynooth, and her Masters in Irish History.

* * *

On 22 April 2014, she turns twenty-two.

On 23 April, she is in The Roost in Maynooth, having a quiet strawberry daiquiri, to celebrate her acceptance into Trinity for September, to start her PhD, when she hears soft piano music (Chopin, she thinks, though her memory of the classical pieces is hazy). Soft piano music, and a low voice crooning words more so than singing (not Chopin), but that voice catches something deep inside, something that knocks the breath from her lungs, and she can't help herself, she needs to see the face that owns that voice, needs to know who it belongs to.

She takes a sip of her cocktail to brace herself, the ice chilling her to the stomach, and stands, and follows that voice.

Follows that voice deeper into The Roost, into the part of it reserved for functions, where she has never been, and finds the player, the singer, both wrapped up in one man.

She cannot see his face, only his back, sees the way he leans into the music, sees the way his hands dance across the keys, fingers long and nimble.

He does not know she is here, has not realized (she assumes it's a he, it's very tall if it's a she and the voice sounds male) and she swallows, and closes her eyes, and listens.

And it is as if someone has reached inside her, has taken every ounce of the longing, every ounce of the grief, every ounce of the desperation, the desire just to be touched, just to be held by someone who understands, who doesn't care, and put it into music, put it into lyrics, and the lyrics are French so she cannot understand them but they etch themselves into her bones, and she swallows, swallows against the throbbing ache in her chest, swallows against the desire to reach out, to reach out and twine her fingers with this pianist's and stop the music because it's too close it's too much and raise those fingers to her lips, and kiss them.

She has never felt so much as if she has been seen, and seen by someone who has never actually seen her.

The music stops, and her eyes flutter open as the pianist turns around, and locks eyes with hers with a gaze that pierces her straight to her heart.

And it is Erik.

_Erik_.

* * *

When she came to Maynooth she promised herself she would not look for him. It had nothing to do with not wanting to meet him, nothing to do with not wanting to love him. She wants to love him, very much, but she wants to love him on her own terms and not because fate and the distortions of time dictated she would, and she wants, has always wanted, her finding him to be a thing that simply happens, and not something that happens because she went actively looking for him, because then she would spend her life wondering if she only found him because she sought him out, or if she would have found him anyway, in some way.

She wanted, for this one thing, to just feel like something normal.

So when the music stops, and she opens her eyes, and meets his gaze, and realizes that this is how it happened, how it would always have happened, she smiles at him, at him and his long fingers and distorted face, and does the first thing that comes to mind.

She offers to buy him a drink.

And something flickers in his face, something unknown, a widening of his eyes, and he accepts.

* * *

Their first date is two strawberry daiquiris in The Roost, followed by a walk to Supermacs for pizza, and she compliments his playing and the tips of his ears redden as he says he only dabbles, but what she heard was a good deal more than dabbling. And he compliments her hands, says they are worthy of any musician, and when she says she plays a little violin, he says he would like to hear her, sometime.

Their second date she plays the violin for him, sitting under an ancient elm, and something in his eyes tells her he would kiss her, if he thought she would not reject him and his distorted face (and even now she cannot tell quite what it is with his face that leaves him looking slightly wrong, a misshapenness that is difficult to identify and she does not want to stare), so she saves him the trouble of working up the nerve, and sets the violin aside, and gently, carefully, takes his face in her hands.

And before he can think about it, she kisses him.

The gentle answering pressure of his lips confirms her suspicion, and as his fingers curl around her wrists, and he gasps into her mouth, she thinks, on the edge of not thinking, that if Sorelli is allowed to love Philippe in that other time, then she is allowed to love Erik in the here and now.

And then he smiles, and she decides to stop thinking.

On their third date, beneath a blanket beneath the stars, they confess their secrets to each other. She can already feel a headache buzzing behind her eyes as he tells of having been born with a terrible deformity, of skin grafts and surgery being the only reason he has a nose, has cheeks, has a face at all. And she kisses him and says it doesn't matter, that what she has to tell him is far worse.

She tells him of time travel, of getting cast backwards and forwards, and leaves out the part that she is fairly sure she loves a woman who died on the day she was born, leaves out the part that she would very much like to kiss that woman if she could, leaves out about having met his future self. Just tells him that she comes and goes, and sometimes she misses things, and there is nothing she or anyone can do about it.

He gapes at her, and cocks a brow.

"You're joking."

"Watch and I'll disappear." She can feel it coming, and before he can say anything else, she does just that.

She finds herself in an alley, smell of salt water in the air, glowing distant light. No way to tell where or when she is, no clothes (typical). She sets out walking, intending to steal some. A wisp of wind blows a paper across her path. August 1937. Sorelli somewhere, with Philippe surely (and she is not sure she even wants to see her right now, not sure she wants to be with her when she has left Erik to be thrown back to here). And before she can decide where to go or what to do or where to find clothes, she is gone.

Erik gapes at her, and keels over in a faint.

* * *

He believes her after that, and when he asks where she's been, she always tells him the truth. And it will not be so very long, until she even tells him about Sorelli.

(And he will not say he understands, but he will kiss her and say that if she should want to do something about those feelings sometime, then she should. "Just because you have me in the here and now, it doesn't mean you can't have someone else when you go." A tear slips down her cheek that he wipes away, and she murmurs, "I don't know why I'm crying." And he smiles and says, "It doesn't matter. You can't control that anymore than when you leave or who you love." And he draws her into his arms, and holds her as she cries.)

(That is the moment she knows she will introduce him to Anea, and to Raoul.)

(Before she gets the chance, she travels, and steals clothes, and finds a newspaper that tells her it is 9 March 1939.)

(Three hours later, Philippe de Chagny will die in her arms.)

(The first person she will see, in her own time, will be Raoul.)

(She will tell him because she will not be able to keep it in, and he will whisper that he wondered, even as the tears trickle down his cheeks, and neither of them are really supposed to drink, but he will produce a bottle of whiskey, and pour a toast to his brother, and a second toast to Sorelli.)

(The third toast will be to her.)


	6. 6

In the slanting moonlight through the window, she studies the architecture of his face, tinged silver. It is the first night she has woken beside him, the first night he has been beside her, and gently she traces the arch of his nose, the nose that was crafted for him to fit his face, brushes the arch of his brow, that can make him look so severe as he tries to work his codes to fit but he never looks severe for her, always has a smile, or the hint of a one, and his lips are soft, softer than anything, and she would kiss them, now, but it hardly seems right to kiss him when he is asleep, when he has no say in it, when he cannot kiss her back.

(When she came back, from 1939, after she left Raoul, it was Erik she sought out first, needing to be close to him, needing to know he was well. A horrible prickle in the back of her mind told her that if Philippe de Chagny had just died in her arms, what was there to keep Erik from having died too? She knew he would have to be alive, how else could her younger self meet him a year from now?, but knowing did nothing to dispel that fear, did nothing to take away the memory of Nollaig, dead after all she had done was visit Sorelli, and she _had_ to see him to even begin to feel normal again, and the first thing he did when she found him in his computer lab was pull her into his arms, and kiss her, those lips softer than ever, and maybe he saw something in her, or maybe he just sensed that things had been terrible, but he held her close as she trembled and tears prickled her eyes, and his voice was soft as he whispered, "You don't have to tell me anything.")

(She did tell him, later, told him everything right down to the way she'd held Philippe's hand, even though he was dead, until they reached the shore, right down to the way she'd walked in a daze all the way to the Steevens' Hospital, and only then, outside the doors, did she realize she could not face Sorelli, not like that, not wearing her fiancé's blood, and she walked away and promised herself never to tell Sorelli she had been there. And as she told him he gently wiped away every tear that trickled from her eyes, and wrapped his arm around her, and rubbed circles into her hand. And when she had finished, he didn't say anything, but there were tears in his eyes too, and he drew her closer, and tucked her head in beneath his chin, and they stayed like that a long time, her listening to his heartbeat, feeling him breathe, just existing, existing, until he whispered, "If I could take it all from you…", and she knew he would, if he could.)

He is beautiful, in his own way. Beautiful in the brightness of his eyes, in his music, in the touch of his hands. And there is beauty in his face too, not obvious beauty but beauty nonetheless, softness in his curves and lines and sometimes you only see them, only realize how they all hang together to create the beauty of him, when you know where to look, when you stop to think.

(She loves him, she does. Loves him, but she cannot say it. The words are not right on her tongue, not yet, and to say it feels as if it is too fragile for light, too fragile to be in the world, but she loves him and she has no doubt of it, and it lives deep in her chest.)

(She loves him, and she loves Sorelli. Loving him has taught her that, has taken the uncertainty from the edges of her feelings, and the love for the two of them is twined together, safe and secure inside her. And she cannot love Sorelli, not the way she wants to, not really, but she can love Erik with everything she has, everything she is made up of, and it is nearly enough.)

She kisses his forehead, and kisses his knuckles, and presses herself closer to him, and he does not stir in the darkness, but it is enough just to be with him, just to have him here.

(It is more than she dared to ask for.)

* * *

19 March 1939. The newspaper, that she finds after she has found clothes, informs her of the date, and she wonders if this is how it is to be now, if every time she travels, it is to be to after Philippe's death.

(The laws of time travel, in so far as she knows them, in so far as time travel seems to have laws, suggest otherwise, suggest she will travel back before these dates, before 1939, and will meet Sorelli again as she was before her illness. Will meet Philippe, perhaps, in life.)

The first time she has travelled anywhere since the day he died, and of course, of course, it would have to be to afterwards.

(She was just beginning to feel a little more steady.)

She should stay away from Sorelli. Should stay away from her and give her space, but the city is cold and grey, greyer than anything, as if Sorelli's grief has spread out through everything, has come to find her, to call her here, and she needs to see her, she needs to, she might go mad if she does not see Sorelli now, so she draws a deep breath, and sets out for the hospital, even as her stomach churns, even as her heart throbs, warning her, telling her to go back, telling her to hide, telling her she does not belong here.

She has never belonged here. That's the whole problem.

(How can she face her now? After what's happened? Will Sorelli see it written in her face?)

(But she's got to see her. She's got to. Why else would she keep getting pulled back if not to see her?)

So she goes to the hospital. She goes to see Sorelli, and Sorelli's face is paler than she has ever seen it, her eyes hollow and bloodshot, and she cannot open her mouth to speak, for to say a single word, can only nod as Sorelli asks her if she knew (and of course she knew, of course, she read it in history books when she was small, she was at his funeral and came face to face with Raoul when they were both sixteen, and she didn't know she would be the one holding him as he died, the one trying to persuade his lungs to keep drawing breath, but that seems immaterial when she has known for years what would happen), and at her nod a hardness comes into Sorelli's features, some settling resolution as if she has confirmed all that needed to be confirmed, and Sorelli's voice is soft, that softness deadly as she whispers, "I never want to see you again."

(Afterwards, when she walks the city for two days, unable to go home, unable to go anywhere her heart insists it needs to be, those words will echo in her head, in her blood, will leave her feeling as if her atoms have been scattered to the wind, and she will wonder what she might have said, what she might have done differently, but Sorelli's hard face will come back to her, and she will know that there would have been nothing.)

* * *

She finds herself in Glasnevin, in her own time. It is a week since she was in 1939, a week, and she has not been able to bear saying more than a few words to anyone, a week and not even Erik has been able to make her smile. All she can think, all she can know, is Sorelli never wants to see her again. Any time she travels to after that date she will never have Sorelli, and it is as if part of her has been cut off, as if she has lost half of herself.

Her best friend from when she was six never wants to see her again.

She always knew time would be spun short, always knew there would come a last time, there had to be, but she never expected it to come so soon, never expected it to be like this.

She stands before the grave that says Philippe de Chagny, and thinks of how Sorelli lived fifty-three years after 1939, how the edges of their lives brushed against each other but never overlapped, and the pain inside is so sharp it is all she can do to breathe around it, all she can do to keep standing. Fifty-three years and she is forbidden from seeing Sorelli in any of it.

It might be easier if she could cry. Might be easier, but try as she may the tears never come, and the pain throbs sharper, and sharper, and sharper.

* * *

25 January 1948. A gathered crowd pressing tight and she threw the newspaper into the closest bin after she read the date because 1948 is too far after 1939 and she knows Sorelli will never forgive her, can never forgive her, for not telling her Philippe would die, for not saving him, the way there is that part of her that try as she may can never forgive her father for not telling her he would die, cannot forgive her older self for not warning her Nollaig would die, and she understands, she understands the hate Sorelli feels for her because she feels it too and sometimes she hates herself so much she thinks she might die of that alone.

But it is 1948, and there is a gathered crowd, and a poster that reads Post-Sanatorium League and another poster that reads Clann na Poblachta and some historian she is, that it takes her this long to put together that it is 1948 and there is to be an election and that means Noël Browne is about to be elected and why the _fuck_ would time throw her back to here if not to torment her more?

(Over and over and over again, the same threads and paths and cycles, woven inside her and through her and around her.)

A rally, and the words that ring out over the crowd, "My brother before he was murdered—" and it's not Browne's voice because she knows what he sounds like but she knows this voice too, knows it only she is more familiar with it softened with age, passing her drinking chocolate and sometimes whiskey and sometimes books and murmuring in agreement and her heart lurches as she looks up, up from the middle of the crowd, to Raoul de Chagny standing on the back of an empty milk truck, his hair shining golden in the late January sun, everything about him defiant and proud at twenty-five and something lurches inside her to see him like this, to see Raoul, her Raoul, fierce and handsome and young.

"My brother before he was murdered insisted he would push for reform of our institutions!"

And the crowd roars in appreciation but she can't take in a word of what he's said, because of course Philippe would want the hospitals reformed, would want them fixed, after seeing Sorelli in there every day for months, would want it for her as much as for anything and the pain inside is sharp again, sharp enough to knock the breath out of her because Philippe loved Sorelli so much and she never thought of it that way before and he died, he died, he died and she didn't stop it and she should have stopped it, should have found some _fucking_ way and through the blur of tears in her eyes she sees Raoul stand aside and be replaced by someone else, be replaced by tumbling dark curls and eyes that could see through to the centre of her soul, and she can't bear to see Sorelli, not like this, not so far away, not when she cannot touch her, cannot hug her, not when Sorelli hates her, and she turns away, the pain throbbing behind her eyes as she lets herself go.

* * *

There is her research, there is Erik, and she tells herself this is all she needs, tells herself this is all she wants, to be content and present. To live in archives and love Erik out of them (even if neither of them speak of it) and go to conferences, and get into academic arguments, and talk to Anea, and have tea with Raoul who is ninety-one and getting so frail, and she can't bear to see him like this, can't bear to think that she's going to lose him too, sooner rather than later, but she plasters her smile on for him because she doesn't want to upset him and tries not to think of the him she saw in 1948 who could not have known that he would still have so long to live but was determined to see through his brother's wishes.

Christmas comes and the cold new year, and Raoul turns ninety-two and spends it in hospital with pneumonia but when she goes to visit him he still manages a thin smile and whispers, "you won't have to dust off your Auden yet" and that's what undoes her, undoes everything, and she keeps it inside until she leaves but when she is back in Erik's arms she lets herself break down because in his arms it's all right to do that, he understands or nearly does, and he holds her and doesn't lie that it's okay because it's not okay, none of this is okay. In what world could any of this be considered okay?

* * *

It is May when she goes again. May of 2015 blurring to October 1934 as she goes to visit Raoul, and she is still in her coat as she straightens up, face-to-face with a younger Sorelli than she has seen in longer than she wants to remember, no lines in her face, no hardness, only a grin to see her.

"21 October 1934." The date comes without her asking, and something like sadness flares in her heart, and something like relief that here at least is a Sorelli who still cares for her, and tears prickle her eyes as she is bundled into those arms and hugged fiercely. "Nine months, Christine. Don't ever do that to me again. I was beginning to think you wouldn't come."

"I'll do my best." Her voice is feeble to her own ears, as Sorelli pulls back, and frowns at her, and that frown becomes a smile again.

"There's someone I want you to meet."

She knows who it is without Sorelli saying another word, and she is being led by the hand before she can say yes or no, down the street into a restaurant where she feels and must look distinctly out of place, and Philippe de Chagny is rising from a table near the back, a table for two, all tall and proper and faintly stern but his gaze is soft as he sees Sorelli, and that gaze travels to her, edged with curiosity.

Sorelli reaches up and kisses him on the cheek, and pain stabs hard in Christine's heart at the sight of it no matter how well or long she's known.

"Philippe? I want you to meet a very dear friend of mine, Christine Daaé."

His smile broadens, the curiosity growing keener, as he stretches out his hand to her. "A pleasure to meet any friend of Sorelli's."

She takes his hand and shakes it, and tries not to think of holding it still and dead, and says, "The pleasure is all mine."


	7. 7

She thinks it would be easier to bear, if he were not so likable. He was not _supposed_ to be so likable. In all her imaginings of him he was haughtily aristocratic, stern and polite to a fault. But that first time she meets him, 21 October 1934, he insists on changing from the table for two he was to share with Sorelli, to a table for three, insists on her joining them, and then insists on paying for her meal too. "Any friend of Sorelli's," he says with a smile, and she can't help but smile back.

The second time she meets him (though it is more than the second time that he has met her) it is 1937, and he invites her to join him at the theatre, to watch Sorelli play Mother Ireland on stage. Any chance to see Sorelli on stage is one she is too weak to pass up, and he pours her wine. It is an extremely pleasant night, and that's the damnable misery of it.

(In the darkness of night, in her own time, she will look at Erik's sleeping face, the taste of that red wine still on her lips, and wonder what he ever did to deserve someone like her.)

The third time she meets Philippe de Chagny (technically the fourth, but she refuses to count the day he died and now she finds herself wondering what he would think, if he could ever have known she would be the one with him at the end), the third time she meets him it is July 1938. He is ashen pale when he sees her, and something flickers in his eyes before he pulls her in for a hug, and his voice is groggy as he whispers, "it's a terrible place for sick people," and she knows he means the hospital, the hospital where Sorelli is newly committed to.

"We've got to do something about it." She doesn't know where the words come from, they just slip from her, the desire to make it right, to fix everything, to save Sorelli from her year of confinement and to save him—to save him—

He pulls back, his eyes resolute, mouth a firm line. "So help me but I'm going to," he breathes. "I don't know how but I'm going to."

And she looks into those hard blue eyes, and the words _you can't_ catch in her throat _you can't you don't have time _and her throat tightens painfully as she nods, nods, and something like love, something like grief shaped as love, flares within her heart.

(This doomed man, and he is not hers, but she would follow him to the ends of the earth if he asked her to, for the sake of Sorelli.)

* * *

It is, as summers go, an ordinary one. She conducts her research, and presents at her first academic conference. Erik goes with her as moral support, history not being his field at all though he sat down and read her Noël Browne books of his own free will ("so I can at least pretend to keep up with you," he grinned and kissed her and she had to laugh then). It is the first conference, too, Raoul has attended in twenty years, and he is gaunt and frail with his cane, but just knowing he is there in the audience, beside Erik, lets her breathe a little easier.

(He was highly respected in his own time, much desired as a speaker at conferences, and even now some of the other eminent speakers remember him, some of the other academics in the audience, and they come up and shake his hand and he tells them he's there to support his granddaughter, and it's not true, not in any way, but there is that bit of mischief in his eyes, and it pacifies the curious, and warms something deep inside of her to hear, something that she can't quite explain.)

Her paper, arguing for a broader analysis of the Mother and Child scandal, is well-received, and she doesn't mess anything up, and she doesn't travel, and her heart swells with the applause, and she wonders if this is how normal people feel when they do well.

Afterwards, they each have a finger of chartreuse, the bottle produced from deep in Raoul's cupboard, and Erik fiddles with the old record player as they talk about the talks they heard, and it's nice, and it's good, and for the first time in longer than she can remember, she feels happy. Just happy, no anxiety marring the edges of it, and Raoul laughs as the music swells around them, and Erik offers his hand to her with a lopsided grin.

"May I have this dance?"

* * *

In November she comes home after two days in 1941 when she danced as if the world didn't exist because when she goes to the time after Sorelli told her to leave all she can do is pretend that nothing matters, whirl herself around in the hope it will return her home faster and it didn't matter that she drank too much cheap wine and almost made herself sick because that still didn't work to get her home. Time itself decided to send her back after she stopped sweating and her head returned to feeling its normal size, and she climbed straight into bed without any regard for the time or the date or anything, deciding sleep would be the best thing for her.

And it feels as if she has only dropped off, when the bed dips and there is the brush of lips against her forehead, and Erik's voice soft in her ear, "you're back."

"Of course." And she feels like shit still but his arms come around her and draw her close, and his laugh is gentle.

"You never told me how adorable you would be."

What's he talking about? Is she supposed to know? She's too tired for this. "What do you mean?"

"You at seventeen." And without opening her eyes she can hear his grin and something lurches in her chest because of course of course she had warned him about where and when her younger self would meet him, but she didn't think she'd miss it, didn't think she'd spend it in 1941, and there is something like disappointment deep in her chest.

"When was it?"

"Half an hour ago." And now she does open her eyes, and he is beaming in the darkness just like she knew he would be, and he kisses her lightly on the nose, his eyes crinkled soft. "The most adorable little thing."

"I wasn't that little." Anyone would be small beside him, the giant of a man, and she was taller than most other girls in her class in school.

But he's still grinning. "Oh you _were_."

* * *

"You know I miss her every day?" Raoul's voice is soft, and he doesn't look away from the fire in the grate, but Christine nods because of course he misses Sorelli. Missing Sorelli is something she can understand without stopping to wonder about it, without stopping to think. She misses Sorelli down to her bones and every time she finds herself in a time after 1939 it's more unbearable than anything else in the world. In the great list of unbearable things, that's near the top. (Second only to her Dad dying, second only to what happened to Nollaig, second only to having been with Philippe. The three of them so different and yet so bound and they were all terrible things that happened so in the list of great unbearable things they are a tier above all else.) "She was my best friend." His fingers are cool beneath hers as she squeezes them, and his lip twitches just slightly but still he doesn't look away from the fire, and she doesn't say a word, because to say a word might only stop him, and she feels like these are things he has kept inside for too long, and she knows about that too. Oh how she knows about it.

He has been reflective lately, melancholy in a way that doesn't suit him at all, and she tries not to think of why, why he feels the need to say these things now, but if all she can do is sit here with him, sit here and listen and let him say what he needs to—

How often has he sat here, and let her talk about every terrible thing she's needed to put into words?

Anea and Erik are in the kitchen, and she knows they're giving them space, giving them time to get these things out that they need to.

(She feels a great rush of love towards the both of them deep in her chest.)

"She didn't have to have anything at all to do with me after—after he died." His voice is softer than a moment before, and something catches inside of her to hear him, a slip of a heartbeat. "I was little more than a child, and it wasn't as if they had been married. It wasn't as if she had a duty to me. But she did and—and I kept every letter she wrote me, and I visited her when I could or—or she visited me in school. Or we just picked somewhere and met there and talked of nothing much at all." And he laughs slightly, and she knows he must be remembering something, some such occasion, and she is glad he is still looking into the fire because there are tears prickling the backs of her eyes, but what right has she to cry over it? Over his history with Sorelli? What is there to cry over in it? Other than two people who needed each other? Each of them a little bit damaged by what happened?

"You know I would have followed her to England when she went." And now he does look at her, head tilted just a bit, still that quirk in his lip. "I would have, and studied in Oxford or some such place if they'd let me in, but the thought of stepping foot on a boat—" And he looks away again, and something wrenches inside of her, pulls just beneath her heart, and he's never said it to her before, not so directly, but she knows he couldn't bear to be out on the water after what happened to Philippe, knows he has a terrible fear of it, even now, even after seventy-six years. "I used to love sailing," he whispers, "but they took that from me too."

* * *

She sees in 2016 in Erik's arms, dancing slowly to a composition of his own (in another world he would have been a musician first, and computer scientist second). Neither of them speak, they just exist, quietly, carefully, and for one night it is as if time exists wholly for them, and nobody else, the candles guttering low as he bows his head and kisses her, and she closes her eyes, and sighs, and holds this moment, just this, just them.

Just him.

* * *

It is March when she finds herself in 1938. March when she left, November when she arrives. The streets slushed ice and mud, the rain drizzling slow. She knows, by now, the way to the Steevens' Hospital almost by instinct (sometimes she walks it in her own time, just to feel it out, has studied every map she can lay her hands on, just in case. Just to be ready.)

The Steevens' Hospital, her stolen clothes wrapped tight around herself, her hat pulled down low. And she is so tired, and her heart is so full, that Philippe recognizes her before she sees him, just before she can step inside.

His hand is firm on her arm, and he leads her out, around by the side of the building, and turns to face her.

His face is pale, his eyes haggard, shining so blue, bluer than she has seen them, and he draws a deep breath, and releases his grip on her arm.

"You love her, don't you?" No preamble, no warning, and the words cut her to her core. How does he know? How could he know?

There is no point in lying. She has told too many lies, and if she were to lie over this—

She just wants to be truthful, just once in her life.

She swallows, and nods. "Yes."

He closes his eyes a long minute, his lips twisting, and there is nothing she can say, no way she can elaborate. She loves Sorelli, loves her as she loves Erik and it exists as simply something that is, something that cannot ever be changed. It is the reason time keeps throwing her back, it must be, this terrible love inside her that would never have existed if she had been normal. "Yes," she sighs.

His eyes open again, and he nods, and there is still that twist in his lip, that slight edge, a hint of something beyond words. "Good." And then, "if something were ever to happen to me," and it is as if he knows, as if he senses it, what will happen, what did happen, "I do not pretend to understand such affairs, but all I want is for her to be looked after."

"It's all I've ever wanted." And it is. All she's ever wanted, just for Sorelli to be well.

He nods again, his lips twitching. "Thank you."

And his hand is warm, when it shakes hers.

(She will not stay this time, will not get to see Sorelli. But when she finds herself at home, she will walk a long time, to try to ease the throbbing pain inside, and in the end she will find herself in Erik's computer lab, and she will take him in her arms, and whisper, "I love you" for the first time, the words exposed to the air, because if she cannot tell Sorelli, if she has Philippe's blessing, at least she can tell him. And she will tell him, and he will kiss her, and whisper, "I know.")


	8. 8

She will never understand, even after all of her years, all of her comings and goings, why it is that sometimes her clothes travel with her, and sometimes they do not.

This time is very much one of those latter times, and when she finds herself in someone's back garden — year and location unknown — she slips into their house through the back door.

She knows she is not alone — there is shuffling from upstairs — so she grabs the first coat and pair of shoes she finds. It's fucking cold out but it will have to do, and once upon a time she might have felt guilty over stealing someone's clothes, but those days are long passed.

Her need, in these times, is greater than theirs.

She is out the door again before she can be seen, and slipping through the garden gate.

Frankly it's a massive inconvenience to have travelled. Erik was just after taking a tray of scones out of the oven, made to Phyllis Browne's recipe (she would have attempted it herself years ago, but she has no faith in her baking skills) and she had just picked up one when the headache struck, and there was no time to try to delay her leaving before it pulled her away.

If it's a long absence in linear time she will be so pissed.

And it's just as bloody cold out as she thought. Colder! The sky tinted almost silver, everywhere the appearance of it having just rained. She sticks her hands in her pockets to try to warm them, even though her legs are freezing too, and the coat is far from enough to try to heat her up. Her fingers brush something cold, and she pulls out a fist of change.

Probably enough for at least a cup of tea.

Even now, in whatever year she's in, everything is familiar enough that she recognizes Dublin. If she were a guessing woman (and she is an academic, and sometimes the two are the same) she would say maybe sometime in the late forties or the early fifties. The streets whisper of that to her, the buildings, the coats the ladies she passes wear wrapped around themselves, and their hats. Dublin, in the time that Sorelli hates her.

She swallows against the bolt of pain, and ducks into the first café she sees, intending just to drink a cup of tea, and figure out where to go from here. She has money, and it's not often she can say that on her journeys into the past.

The café is already crowded and loud with chatter, though it feels early in the day, and there are newspapers opened on all of the tables. If she had better sight, she might see the date, might see some headlines, but too long in archives has left her just a little shortsighted.

It's too noisy for her, and she has just decided her cup of tea will be quick (just to warm her a bit, before she decides on what to do) when she catches a flash of blond hair through the cigarette smoke, and she turns her head to find Raoul, a much younger Raoul than she is used to, one lit cigarette in his hand though she has never known him to smoke, a newspaper folded before him and two cups of tea, though he is alone at the table.

His eyes catch hers (he is pale and haggard, his stubble golden, eyes rimmed a little red), a faint twitch of his lips as if he would smile, and he pushes one cup of tea across to the empty seat before him. A silent invitation for her to join.

She wonders how this Raoul knows her, as she cuts between two tables, and settles into the seat.

He takes a drag of the cigarette, and sighs out the smoke and asks, his voice a little hoarse, "when are you coming from?"

"April 2016." There was an article she was in the process of editing while Erik was making the scones, and she needs it to be ready by the end of the month.

He nods, his brow quirking slightly. "Your thesis?"

Clearly some version of her has spent a good deal of time talking to him, if he is correlating dates to events. "About three-quarters of the way through the first draft."

He nods, and sighs. "You never told me what it's about," and it's on the tip of her tongue to say something, to tell him that some day she will (to tell him, maybe, that some day he will be a good help to her with it, will sit wearing his glasses with his eyes closed while she reads what she has written to him, and will tell her things to make it better) but she has no idea what this Raoul does and does not know about his future and her past, and before she can resolve anything into words, he pushes his newspaper across the table to her. "I suspect it might be this," and unfolds it.

_The Irish Times_. 12 April 1951, and just as her stomach drops, and her heart thuds, her eyes slide down the page, _DR BROWNE REPLACED BY MR COSTELLO…Minister's Scheme Killed By Hierarchy Ruling…MINISTER RELEASES CORRESPONDENCE _Noël Browne looking faintly aloof and she stares at the paper, jaw slack and mouth dry, and it's all she can do to swallow, all she can do to remind herself to breathe, of all the times to come to, all the places time could have brought her, what were the odds it would whirl her exactly sixty-five years into the past?

She raises her head and meets his gaze, and nods dumbly. "Yes." Her voice is faint to her own ears, and he takes another drag of his cigarette, and sighs.

"In that case," And he smiles, his eyes watering just a little, "I still have that stock of clothes at home you told me to keep, if you want to join me in the viewing gallery. Write about the atmosphere in the _House of Parliament_," And he drawls it in a faintly English accent, "as the whole thing comes tumbling down."

* * *

She stays a week in 1951, a week in which she reads every newspaper she can, and attends the sittings of the Dáil with Raoul to watch first hand the vicious infighting of the government, and it is the first time in longer than she wants to remember that being in the past is not painful, is utterly _fascinating_, and it is almost easy, to not wonder how much time she will have missed at home.

Raoul insists on wining and dining her, on taking her to the theatre, to the cinema, to the library, and this Raoul is only a handful of years older than she is, is younger than Erik, and it's a little amusing, and a touch bittersweet, to find the similarities in him, to how he is in her time, to how Philippe has been with her, both brothers gently insistent, unfailingly polite, refined in an aristocratic way and full of good humor and precise tastes. It is endearing to see this Raoul, so relaxed and so correct and so adamant over what he believes.

In some ways, he is not so very different to her Raoul.

She is enjoying herself so much, it barely even stings to see the posters of Sorelli dressed as Countess Markievicz advertising her latest film, and though Sorelli comes to visit Raoul several times, to discuss the political scandal of Browne refusing to bow to the Church (and fuck but Christine really can't believe she's _here_ for it, she _gets to see it first hand_), she never sees her, keeps out of sight, and reads instead how the Church is advising people to boycott the film, on account of the lead actress publicly defending the scheme they've condemned.

Christine feels a little flare of pride, to think of Sorelli beautiful and defiant.

(If time travel could be like this always, it would not be so terrible.)

* * *

After a week, she finds herself in the same upstairs room in Raoul's house where she has slept every night of 1951, only now it smells faintly musty, and there is a quality to the air that whispers of her own time. She has, more than once, availed of the clothes he still keeps in this room for her, and though he never told her when or why he came to know of her ability, she is beginning to understand that it must have been sometime in the forties, and that for the best part of seventy years he has been prepared for her to appear at any time.

(She wonders, idly, if there is a future version of herself, that comes back to this time, now, with Raoul as an old man, and resolves not to think on it, because surely that future self must be coming from a time without him, and the thought of a time without him is more than she wants to countenance.)

She dresses, and combs a hand through her hair, and for a moment considers looking for the newspapers that she slipped under the bed half an hour ago and sixty-five years away, but decides instead to go downstairs, and see him, and find out how long she has been gone.

An excellent plan, and she takes the stairs two at a time, ready to ask about 1951 and _why he never told her_ she would find herself there because she would _very much have liked_ knowing about that, and she finds him in the living room, sitting back in his chair reading his paper, glasses perched on the end of his nose and white hair shining in the thin morning light.

He peers at her over the top of his paper, and she is just about to speak when he sets it down and says, "it's been a week" and follows it, an edge in his voice, with, "I think you should sit down."

* * *

Erik. A car accident going to a conference in Cork. Two days ago, and she _wasn't here_.

The fear that clenches around her heart drives the breath from her lungs, and Raoul barely has time to tell her that he's going to be all right before she's rushing out the door.

A car accident, Erik, Erik, _Erik_.

The trip across town is a blur, and she's sweating as she rushes into the hospital, hairs on the back of her neck prickling, and Raoul told her the floor number and the room as she ran out the door, but still it takes too long to climb the stairs, too long to cut down the hall though she walks as fast as she can and she finds the room and the first person she sees is Anea who pulls her into a hug, but she's pulling away, pulling away because there's Erik, propped in bed, and his face is pasty and pale and there's a stitched gash over his eye, and tubes and wires and his right arm in a sling, but he's smiling at her and she's not crying, she's not, her eyes are just watering, and she'd hug him but she doesn't want to hurt him, and his hand is curling around her fingers, drawing her closer, and he's kissing her face and she is crying now, she is, but he's all right, he's going to be all right, and he's whispering, "still have one good arm to hold you with," and his voice is hoarse as she kisses him, kisses him, and she feels him swallow and his next words take her breath away, "marry me."

A question, half a question, and she presses herself as close as she dares and whispers, "yes."

* * *

Their wedding is in May. 21 May, the day before the nineteenth anniversary of when she first travelled. Once she was five, on the cusp of discovering that there is something that makes her very special indeed, on the cusp of meeting her older self and discovering the girl who would be her best friend and her first love and a special love that still endures, never to be shared. Now she is twenty-four, and part of her wishes she were not so special, wishes she could be just like anyone else, but if she were just like everyone else there are so many dear people she would not have in her life, and one of them she is about to marry, and another is going to give her away.

(And Raoul is ninety-three, and when she asked him if he would, tears glistened in his eyes and he whispered he would be honored.)

Neither of them have any desire for a big wedding, and in truth there are only two people that they want to share it with, and so with Raoul giving her away, Anea assigns herself to making sure Erik looks after himself, because he is still not himself after his accident, and his shoulder is still a mess, his arm still in a sling and his ribs still delicate, and with the two people they care about most in the world present, they decide it is enough to get married with just a registrar, and not to bother with a priest.

The ceremony is short and quick, their names signed to paper, and all through it part of her is holding out that her father might appear, but how would he know where to find her? What part of her past would he be thrown forward from? Would it be more cruel, for him to come and be reminded of all of her future he will never see?

When the tears threaten, Erik holds her tighter, and it is the only dark moment in a bright day.

(Their reception, such as it is, is a meal in a restaurant, and then Raoul's living room with his old record player, Erik holding her close with his good arm as they sway, and Anea toasts them with Raoul's old bottle of chartreuse, and there comes a knock on the door. Raoul is the one who opens it, leaning heavy on his cane, and there is her father, his blond hair streaked grey, and she remembers a day a month before he died, when he went away and came back happy and a little sad and hugged her and refused to tell her where he had been and she assumed in the past with her mother, but he was here, here with her on the evening of her wedding, and he hugs her and kisses her hair with tears in his eyes, and hugs Erik then too, and apologizes for being late. "How did you know where to find us?" And his smile is just a little sad. "I was reliably informed," and she knows he means by an older her.)

("You never put this date on the list." "I wanted to keep a surprise.")

* * *

It is the early hours of the morning, 22 May, and she is still wearing her wedding dress (dark blue, and not like a normal wedding dress at all) when she travels, and is glad that she has given Erik her ring, to wear on a chain for safe-keeping, but this time she keeps her clothes.

Keeps her clothes and finds herself in a crowd of cheering people beneath a bright blue sky, and she is behind someone she would know anywhere, would know at the end of the world, black hair hanging in a plait down her back, and it is Sorelli, Sorelli, and of course time would take her to Sorelli now, when she has just been married, but she has no time to hide, no time to figure out what time this is, but Sorelli is turning around, turning around and the first glimpse of that face makes her heart lurch, the lines etched around her eyes that were not there before, that were not there in March 1939 when Sorelli told her to go away, and it is the face she loves but later, older, and she braces herself for something she doesn't want to hear, but Sorelli's face softens, and her eyes dance as she smiles, and her hand is gentle cupping the back of Christine's neck.

Her lips are softer than Christine ever dared to imagine, and she opens her mouth beneath them, and closes her eyes, and feels like she is dreaming.

(The hand warm cupping her head tells her she is not dreaming at all, and the tongue that caresses the inside of her lip.)

(Her heart swells so much she thinks she could die, here and now, and would be perfectly happy to go.)

(There are tears on her cheeks, but hers or Sorelli's, she has no way to tell.)

(They cling to each other as if they are the only two left in the world.)

(To all intents and purposes, they are.)

* * *

Later there will be time for whispers, time for confessions and apologies, and soft kisses in the darkness, and hesitant touches. Later there will be time for a great many things.

But now there is Sorelli clinging desperately to her, salty tears upon their lips as they kiss and part and kiss again, invisible in a crowd of cheering people relieved and excited that the war is over, and there is no room in her heart, no room in her head, for anything but the knowledge that Sorelli doesn't hate her, that Sorelli loves her, loves her and wants her and needs her and Erik loves her too, and she must be the luckiest person in the world, to be loved and wanted in two separate times by two different people, and how she loves the both of them so very much. And she smiles into Sorelli's mouth, and Sorelli's laugh is a little high, a little breathless, and something thrums through her, some secret knowledge that this is what it was all for. And as Sorelli's deep dark eyes brim with fresh tears, she thumbs them away, and kisses her again, just for good measure.

Just because she can.


	9. 9

She spends one night in 1945, a glorious beautiful night, in which neither she nor Sorelli sleep very much at all. Instead they hold each other in the darkness, and kiss, and quietly whisper, and there is nothing more intimate than the gentlest of touches.

("I understand now," Sorelli whispers, "why you couldn't tell me he would die. And I'm sorry, more sorry than I will ever be able to say, for telling you to go away." And Christine kisses her forehead, and strokes back a curl of her hair and whispers, "I understand why you did. And if things had been the other way around, I think I would have done the same." And in gentleness they forgive each other, though there was nothing, truly, to forgive.)

She will be back, she knows it truly now, will be back in the time she thought Sorelli hated her, and especially will be back in the time Sorelli loves her. And when the headache comes, prickling behind her eyes, they share one last kiss before she surrenders herself to it.

And she is back in Raoul's living room, still wearing her wedding dress, and only ten minutes have passed since she left, but for her it has been a lifetime.

Erik hugs her with his good arm, and she kisses him and breathes, "I love you," and he smiles into her mouth. "I love you too."

She will not tell him tonight, will not tell any of them tonight, but she will tell him in the morning, and he will laugh with tears in his eyes, and kiss her fiercely and say, "that's the best thing I've ever heard," and she will know he means it, will know he loves her all the more for how she loves Sorelli, and how she _gets_ to love Sorelli.

Raoul will be the second person she tells, later that day over their tea, and the grin that will spread across his face will take twenty years off him, and his eyes will shine with happiness and with tears as he hugs her and says, "I've always hoped I'd live to see it."

He will go into his library, and come back with a battered old journal, that he will present to her. On the inside page will be written _Mo Scéal Féin Sorelli Conway_ in a hand she doesn't recognize, and his eyes will be just a little sad as he says, "Philippe gave it to her, their last Christmas. But she never wrote a word in it until May 1945, and it ends on the day that you found each other again. I've never read it, but I was given strict instructions that you were not to have it until now."

"By me?"

And he will shake his head. "By her. She said you had to live it, as much as you could. And live the rest of what would come after."

* * *

She goes a lot that year. Short absences in linear time — minutes, hours. Longer stays in the past — days, weeks. Nights in Sorelli's arms, kisses and whispers, breath and hands warm on breasts and skin. 1945, and 1946, and a memorable visit to 1951, April, and Sorelli whirls her around in her arms and said, "You never said you'd be here for a week. I could have met you!"

But she smiles and says, "it was too soon for me. I had to get through 1945 first." And they will laugh and kiss and it will be as if there had never been anything between them.

* * *

("It's only right," Erik whispers, carding his fingers through her curls, "that you should have two people to love you.")

* * *

("I would be upset," Sorelli's breath is soft, "if you were alone in your own time. It's just a pity I can never meet him.)

* * *

("I'd like to hug her.")

* * *

("I'd like to shake his hand.")

* * *

There are things Raoul tells her, that winter, in between their teas, between their chats over her thesis, between her official interviews with him, between the normal things they always talked about, between their gentle silences, that he has never told her before. Things that he never _had_ to tell her before, because she always knew, the older her who lived through it with him, but he wants her to be ready, doesn't want it to come as a shock to her, when the time comes that she will live through it.

So he tells her about a young man he knew, who seemed so much a boy but he was as old as Raoul himself, and they shared a room in the Newcastle sanatorium in 1952. He was John, and they called him Jack, and it was the first time Raoul ever kissed another man, the first time he ever wanted to, and though they were both sick he loved him more than anyone else.

(He's loved men since, different men and men just the same, but none of them could fill the gap of Jack, that first sweet love, and they were careful with each other in the darkness, careful not to make any noise, and it was doubly illicit but maybe that was why it was so wonderful.)

But the streptomycin didn't work for Jack, the way it worked for Raoul, and he died under the surgeon's knife, trying to stop the bleeding in his chest.

(The remove of sixty-four years, and there is still the pain in Raoul's voice, the grief, and the gratitude, that the drugs could save him, and that Browne had not been Jack's surgeon. He doesn't think he could have borne it, if Browne had been the surgeon.)

So he tells her, now, these things he never told her, and she holds his hand as the tears shine in his eyes, and there is no more need for words, after that.

* * *

Another one of his secrets, imparted, just for her. And every time she visits, now, he gives her one. All of these tiny pieces of him. And it's inexplicable, but he feels a little easier, that it will not all be forgotten.

* * *

9 March 1939, night, and it is more correctly the tenth, but it hardly matters now. Her skills of breaking and entering are well refined, and she's known, for a long time, the morgue where they brought Philippe after they took him off the boat.

She is dressed as a man, her hair neatly folded up, and she steals a white doctor's coat as she slips inside. She knows precisely where they kept him, found it in old archived paperwork when she was looking into a different matter, and she goes straight there now, to the little room where he's lain alone in the cold for the last handful of hours. There is a sheet covering him, hiding him from the world, and in the stillness she is careful not to make a sound as she eases it back to reveal his face, so pale, almost glowing in the darkness.

(If she were a different kind of woman, if so much of her life had not been written by death, perhaps she would be superstitious over this, perhaps she would be spooked. But she knows too much of death to be frightened at being surrounded by it, and besides, hers are the last hands he ever felt.)

The cut over his eye has been stitched closed, a dark purple slash marring the paleness of him, and she brushes her fingertips over it, over it and over his closed eyes, and the line of his nose, and over his lips, and she has often seen Raoul in him before, or Raoul as he might have been if he were a little broader, but he is only Philippe tonight, only Philippe, and his face is so still that nothing of his brother remains in it.

(She is grateful in a way that can't be named.)

Carefully, as if she could hurt him now, she brushes back a lock of his hair — still slightly damp and sticky, from the water and from the blood — that is lying on his forehead, and with her hand resting there, hiding the cut above his eye, she bows her head, so that her lips are beside his ear.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, as if he might hear her, as if there might be a way. "I'm so sorry I couldn't save you. It's the way it was bound to happen, and it was always out of my hands. All I could do was be a witness, and I'll always wish there had been more." She swallows, an odd pain in her chest, and whispers, "I promise I'll love her with all that I have. To the end of my days I'll love her, and so help me but she'll never want for anything." She combs her hand back over his hair again and adds, "and Raoul will turn out just fine. You don't have to worry about him, I promise."

And she kisses his forehead, so cold and tasting faintly of the sea, and with one last look down into his face, she covers the sheet back over him again.

(She might have gone to the graveyard, might have spoken to the stone that bears his name, but it would not feel so real as this, would not feel so much as if he could hear.)

* * *

On a point of principle, she refuses to visit Sorelli's grave. Someday she will, she knows. Some future version of her, who will have been with her as she died, who will have arranged things along with Raoul, and who will attend the funeral. But until that future day, she refuses to set foot in the graveyard where Sorelli lies. It is a promise she has made to herself, and one she intends to keep.

* * *

If there were some way of sending letters into the past, she would. She would send letters back to Sorelli, love letters and letters with little nothings in them, just for her to have, just so she knows she is thinking of her. But there is no way for her to do such a thing, no magic that would permit it, and when she does not travel, and she aches to love Sorelli, she loves Erik a little more.

(And when it happens the other way, when it happens that she is in the past and it is Erik's hands she longs to feel, his lips she longs to kiss, his voice she craves in her ear and breathed into her skin, she loves Sorelli even gentler, with even sweeter kisses.)

(In June 1953, she sits down and writes twenty notes, and arranges for them to be posted separately on consecutive days, and it is not enough, but it as close as she can get to writing Sorelli every day.)

* * *

She sketches, in her time and out of it. Sketches Sorelli from memory, and Sorelli sitting before her, posed in elegant dresses and tailored suits, always something aloof and alluring in her face. She sketches Raoul, both the Raoul of her time and the younger Raoul that at once seems so different and yet the same. She sketches Philippe from memory, sketches Erik as he sleeps. There is the amusing experience of sketching Noël Browne from the distance in 1970, the faint bemusement in his face, and then seeing the sketch on display in an exhibition of her own time, credited to an artist known only as C.D.

On a different occasion, the shock is so great, when she finds a sketch of Sorelli in a collection of papers in the archive, a sketch that she drew only a week before but what was really sixty years in the past, that her heart very nearly stops then and there.

* * *

The experience of going to the beach and lying on the sand beneath the burning sun in June when barely an hour ago it was January is one she will never get used to, but when Sorelli kisses her she thinks that it just might be possible.

Every time she gets back, Erik twines his fingers with hers, and smiles, and asks if she had a good time.

* * *

In March 2017, Raoul's lungs finally fail.

He is ninety-four, and he has been tired lately, tired in a way that is strange for him. He dozes as she reads to him from the newest draft of her thesis, and sometimes he stirs awake enough to correct her on a point, or to add something to an earlier statement, but often she just lets him rest. When he is awake, he still has his old humor, his old smile, still has stories for her, but she knows the time is growing short, knows it cannot be much longer.

The day Anea rings her, to say he is in hospital, it is not a surprise, but it not being a surprise does not keep her heart from dropping through the floor, and she swallows hard against the bile that rises in her throat.

She is down as his next of kin, in his will as his sole beneficiary, and for the three days that he is in the hospital, she never leaves his side.

So help her, but she was not there when her father died. She was not there when Nollaig died. There is no where else she can bear to be when Raoul dies.

He seems happy to see her, every time he wakes, even with his eyes heavy with exhaustion from the drugs that are keeping him comfortable, from the effort of still breathing.

(It might almost be amusing, in a twisted horrible sort of way, that she was with Philippe when he died and she is with him and there is sixty-eight years and thirteen days between both occasions.)

He does not wake at all, that last day, but every now and then his fingers stir in hers, and she knows he knows, still, that he is not alone, and if all she can do is be here, then she will.

(Erik is at her side, his arm around her, and Anea is holding Raoul's other hand, and none of them speak a word, because there is nothing, now, at the end, that needs to be said.)

She watches the slight shiftings of his face, listens to the hoarseness of his breathing, the faintness of it, listens to the monitors measuring out his life, and thinks of ninety-four years, thinks of both of them sixteen and grieving and face to face at Philippe's funeral, thinks of him in 1941 dancing as the New Year comes in and his arms around her and not knowing who he was until they kissed, thinks of July 1945 and the first time Sorelli introduced them and that slight frown of recognition and it was then that she told him and he did not believe her, not until he saw her disappear, and she thinks of a myriad of other times, seeing him campaigning in 1948 with his hair shining gold, and that week they spent together in 1951 and the way he laughed and whirled her around to find her in 1954, and how he was ready for her, how he was expecting her, the first time she went to the house in Malahide after her dad died _impeccable timing as ever _he said with that smile and she felt as if she had done something wrong, but there was only happiness in his face to see her, and he was happy every time she went to see him, and it was most days, and he helped her to make sense of her brain when nothing else could, and he was her best friend, and her mentor, and her inspiration, and she would have followed him to hell, would have done anything he ever asked of her, but he never did ask anything, and he was always ready, if she ever needed him, ready every time she _did_ need him, even if he often just held her hand, and didn't say very much at all.

There were times she felt safer sitting beside him than anywhere else in the world.

She remembers everything, every time she ever saw him, every time she ever spoke to him, and it's thousands and thousands of times now, but it still doesn't feel like enough, doesn't feel like it could ever be enough, and she knows she will see him again, will see his younger self and even his older self but she will never see him again after this date, this date is the last one on the list, and it's all she can do to breathe around the pain in her own chest.

(She kisses his cheek, and closes her eyes, and lays her head down on his shoulder, her fingers still laced with his, and feels it as the life leaves his body, feels it as he grows cold. And it is all quiet, just quiet, except for her own breathing, and it is easy to pretend, just to pretend, that everyone is only sleeping.)

* * *

They bury him on a murky day in late March. The rain holds off, the funeral is quiet, a handful of historians, come to pay their respects, old friends of his campaigning days. She plays her violin with her eyes closed as they lower him into the ground, and the music flows over the land, over the city into the mountains, and she feels it in her fingers, and though she knows he is in that box, though she is the one who fixed his tie, and combed back his hair still so thick and white, and slipped a final sketch into his inside pocket, the music is more real than the fact of him being gone.

Erik, his face blanched pale and eyes rimmed red, reads 'To His Coy Mistress', just because it would amuse Raoul to hear, however out of place it is at a funeral, however out of place among a crowd like this, and the priest's face is schooled to careful stillness and she knows he must be faintly scandalised and the very fact of it makes her want to laugh, but if she laughs now, she will never be able to stop.

She holds herself together, though her throat aches terribly to do it, and her voice is hoarse as she fulfills her promise of reciting Auden, even as she cannot see the coffin for the tears in her eyes.

He always loved Auden.

(The first time she will go, afterwards, will be to 1993, and he will be the only one she sees, and it will be then that she breaks down, then that the tears come, because just two days ago they buried him and here he is before her looking so young, so well, so many less lines in his face even though he's far from being young, so much less gaunt, and he will set aside his paper, and frown at her, "Christine?" because she is crying and she is younger than the last Christines he has seen, and he will pull her into his arms but the tears will only come harder, and he won't ask what's happened, won't ask what's wrong, but he will stroke her hair and rub her back and hold her close, and she will know he suspects what's brought her here, know he suspects his death.)

(Afterwards he will sit her down, and take both of her hands in his, and look her dead in the eye and say, "I don't care whether you think I should know or not. Tell me about how it happens." And she will not be able to help herself, so she will.)

* * *

22 May 1947, and Sorelli grins as she kisses her. "So let me get this straight, any second now there's a very tiny you going to appear in this kitchen?"

"In about half an hour, which is why you need to be out of here."

"I'll be honest, I'm having trouble getting my head around this." How Raoul still manages to look bewildered she will never understand. She must have explained this ten times by now, and God but it's weird that Raoul doesn't already understand everything. He was so good at the ins and outs of all this in her time.

(There is a stab of pain in her heart to remember him, because to her it is barely a month since he died, and here he is at twenty-four managing to seem so much a child.)

She sighs and looks to her father, a far younger version of her father than she is used to, from shortly after this very first trip of hers into the past, and it feels profoundly strange to have him here, with Sorelli and with such a young Raoul, but he is taking it well in his stride.

"What she means," he says, smiling just slightly at her even as he addresses Raoul, "is the five year old version of her is about to appear here. It's the first time she's travelled, and she's going to be a little frightened, but it's going to be all right because Christine will talk to her."

(They've already had their own quiet talk, her dad still getting used to the notion that she is a time traveller too, that she is the grown-up version of his little girl. "I never wanted you to turn out like me. I never wanted you to go through it." And she hugged him and said, "I don't mind. I'm glad that I am like you." "It's not terrible?" "Only very rarely. Most of the time it's great." And he smiled at her with tears in his eyes and whispered, "I'm glad that you're happy.")

"That's the part I'm having trouble with. She'll be talking to herself."

"Talking to myself as a child, yes."

"But should it not be impossible? For two versions of you to share the same space?"

Sorelli is grinning again. "You'd think that, wouldn't you?" And Christine knows she is remembering one particular night, when her as she is now and a her from several years in the future both stayed with her.

"Fortunately it's not impossible, and I suggest you all get out so I can be ready."

Raoul grumbles something incomprehensible, and Sorelli grins again and kisses her. Her father's hug is gentle. "I'll be right back after to see you."

She kisses his cheek. "I'll be looking forward to it."

One last hug from Sorelli, and a kiss pressed to the corner of her mouth, and she laughs as she watches the three of them head out the door into the garden, her father and Raoul already in a debate over something and Sorelli laughing at them, and turning back to wink at her. The three dearest people to her, that she can never keep, now, in her own time, all of them here for this.

The door swings shut, and blocks them from sight, and she is a little sad, her heart a little heavy, to lose them now for however short a time, but they will be back afterwards, and they will laugh over this when her tiny self has gone back home to be swung around by her daddy and told that he is a time traveller too. And it will not be long, after, until she goes back to her own time, to Erik, and tells him all about this.

But for now there is her, and an empty kitchen, and a ticking clock, and she has a world of travels behind her, and a world more ahead of her, and it is all beginning again, here, today.

She settles down at the table, and combs a hand through her hair, and waits.


End file.
